


roaring twenties

by sonatine



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Artist Steve, Fluff, M/M, Veteran Bucky, millenials, modern AU - no powers, two introverts meet in a bar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-13
Updated: 2015-10-15
Packaged: 2018-04-26 06:31:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4993873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonatine/pseuds/sonatine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky and Steve meet all over Brooklyn until they get their act together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The first time Bucky met Steve was in a bar. This was unusual in itself because Bucky _never_ dated anyone he met at a bar.

Usually he was bored to tears and either left the conversation mid-drink or found an alternate method to shut them up. Which meant that most of his bar advances turned into casual hookups, one-night stands, or just nice, drunken sloppy kisses in the dark corner under the guise of pounding music.

But this time he was so taken off guard by the tiny, sassy little shit that he honestly forgot to drink his overpriced microbrew (fucking Park Slope) and found himself still hunched over the end of the bar, hours later, still talking to the small, tattooed dime-a-dozen hipster in flannel and oversized glasses.

Except he wasn’t. Dime a dozen, that is. They’d started off as commiserating Millenials—

 

The small blond guy had squeezed in between Bucky and Natasha without so much as an excuse me and grabbed Clint’s sleeve from across the counter. Natasha’s eyebrows had flown up and a look of gleeful anticipation crossed her face.

But Clint just sighed and rubbed his face and said, in a dread monotone, “What’ll it be, champ.”

Bucky incredulously watched the blonde guy down flaming tequila shots and a glittery cocktail, and then settle into the bar, shoulders relaxing, and sedately sip at a beer—as if he were a sensible middle-aged man, and not a barely-legal adult (he looked _so_ young, seriously, was this his twenty-first birthday?) that hadn’t just ingested a large amount of colorful liquid.

“Celebrating?” Bucky asked.

“Moving out,” the guy said. “Got my first own place.”

“Hey congrats,” said Bucky. “Maybe you want to take it easy so you can actually make it there tonight.”

The guy turned and stared him dead in the eye. “You calling me a lightweight?”

“Uh.” Bucky looked the guy up and down. Long eyelashes, thin handsome face, pouty bottom lip (fuck, he was pretty), and no more than a hundred and ten pounds. “Yeah, I definitely am.”

The guy glared at him and immediately began to shotgun his beer.

“Whoa, hey, that wasn’t an insult,” Bucky said, now fearing he would be saddled with taking care of this (super attractive) stranger after he threw up, passed out, or otherwise inconvenienced Bucky’s _would-be_ calm and relaxing night off. “Just casual concern.”

“Give it a rest, Steve,” said Clint, as the small blond geared up for a comeback.

“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Steve said, accepting his credit card back from Clint. “ _Nor_ yours,” he said to Bucky.

  

—until they weren’t.

 

“She died, actually,” Steve said. “Monday.”

“As in Monday, five days ago?” said Bucky.

Steve gave a jerky nod.

“Shit.” Bucky planned on saying something more sympathetic but then found himself admitting: “I, uh, actually left home at eighteen. I moved back at twenty-six.”

Steve’s eyes went straight to Bucky’s left arm. It was realistic enough that most people, especially inebriated, didn’t notice. “Marines?”

“Rangers.”

 

—and as if these casual admissions had been all it took (a password of sorts?), Natasha and Clint and Sam had melted into the background until they weren’t there anymore and Bucky and Steve were surrounded by a new wave of people leaning against the bar. The lights had dimmed and music had switched from upbeat to aggressive. Bucky’s elbow hurt from leaning on it so long.

He blinked and realized Steve was standing even closer to him now, close enough that Bucky could feel the heat from Steve’s leg pressed against his own. Steve reached out a hand and absently rubbed the sleeve of Bucky’s shirt between his finger and thumb as he talked. It was the most adorable thing Bucky had ever seen.

A grin spread across his face and Steve smiled back, perplexed but delighted all the same, and Bucky felt that rare secure feeling: the surety of liking someone and _knowing_ they like you back.

And then he saw Steve’s eyes wander to the right. Steve tensed and pulled back. Bucky watched a dark-haired girl with red lipstick walk their way. He’d seen her clock Steve, purse her lips, start to head in the other direction, and then apparently think better of the coward’s route. She turned her trajectory back toward Steve: resolutely keeping eye contact.

Steve looked anxious but also brighter, and Bucky fell into that instant spiral: _did I misread everything? Is this is girlfriend? Ex-girlfriend? Unrequited crush? Is he even into guys or even into_ me _at all—?_

Bucky quietly left, texting Natasha to cover his drinks and that he’d pay her back.

Whatever the situation was with Steve and the girl, it was already too complicated for Bucky and he just felt tired. Tired and overwhelmed. He walked out of the bar and with every step away from the noise and light and music it was easier to breathe.

.

The second time was a Tuesday night. Bucky was buying laundry detergent and roach spray and toilet paper, which are all things you want to be seen with in your basket, and then someone walked down the aisle and Bucky froze.

She still had on red lipstick, but her hair was longer and flat. Bucky nodded as he passed by, hurrying, but she caught hold of his arm.

“Hey. Hi,” she said. “I think we’ve met before.”

“I don’t think so,” Bucky said shortly.

“We have,” she insisted. “At that bar a few weeks ago—next to the blue bodega and across from that muffin shop. The only one in Brooklyn with decent music.”

“Then definitely no,” Bucky said, but he noticed her eyes were crinkling up.

“You’re right. It’s bloody awful. But my girlfriend deejays there, and she assures me that it’s _good_ music—very respected dubstep and DNB, if that interests you.”

“It doesn’t,” said Bucky, over the blaring alarm of _girlfriend! girlfriend!_ going off in his head.

She grinned. “Right,” she said, rocking back on her heels and sliding her hands into her back pockets. “My ex has been talking about you almost non-stop for the past month. Which is pretty pathetic, considering, but that’s how Steve is. When he decides to like someone, he latches on and doesn’t let go.”

“Steve?” Bucky said, hoping and praying.

Peggy arched an eyebrow. “Skinny pretty blond with a chip on his shoulder? You two were talking for hours—literally hours—at the bar.”

“Oh, _Steve_ ,” Bucky deadpanned.

Peggy looked nonplussed. He began to panic.

Bucky had problems with inflection since he’d returned. Doctors said a lot about _language centers_ and _non-verbal cues_ , but the upshot was that a lot of what Bucky said to other people was misconstrued. Alcohol and comfortable situations helped relax him—but you can’t always be drinking, nor can you live your life cocooned in familiar places with familiar people.

So mostly Bucky kept quiet. It was safer.

“I do remember him,” said Bucky hastily. “Actually, I—”

Peggy was already smiling.

“Huh,” she said.

She then followed him around until he gave up trying to shake her and headed for the register. In that time, she told him stories about Steve saving kittens from trees on three separate occasions, the circumstances around him being banned from five bars, and the ten times he’d ended up in the hospital in the past two years—all of which culminated in frantic chases around the ward when he’d disappeared from his room, only to be found by nurses in the children’s area playing Floor Lava with runny-nosed kids.

Bucky was finding it harder to clamp down the smile that was threatening to break. He paid for his toilet paper and fled.

.

So Bucky hadn’t actually met Steve again, per se. But he somehow felt he had. In any case, the next morning he woke up from a dream so domestic and ordinary that it barely counted as a dream at all. He spent the rest of the day irrationally annoyed to realize he hadn’t woken up feeling bored; he’d felt bereft.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

The second (third? Second-and-a-half?) time Bucky met Steve was at one of those pysch studies hosted in a university classroom—the kind flyered around the city on white sheets of paper with a date, time, and address. All you had to do was show up, fill out a survey or answer non-sequitur questions, and then leave with twenty bucks in your pocket. It was the kind of thing poor college students showed up to for easy money. Bucky wasn’t a college student—yet—he might go someday, free on the army’s tab—but he wasn’t good enough to turn up his nose at tax-free cash.

At twenty-eight, he felt ancient standing next to the other nineteen- and twenty-year-olds all waiting in the hallway outside of the classroom. Logically, he knew only a few years separated them. But their easy chatter set his teeth on edge.

He skulked in the back of the group, blending into the background. In fact, he was so focused on blending that he did not immediately notice someone standing beside him. Very close beside him.

Bucky jerked away, already pissed that some kid had gotten the drop on him. Then he noticed the big blue eyes behind hipster glasses, the soft blond hair, and the tattoos peeking out from beneath his t-shirt.

“Hi,” said Steve.

“Hi?” Bucky said, trying to regulate his breath. His hand was perched awkwardly on his hip, where he had automatically reached for the knife that wasn’t there.

Steve didn’t play it cool at all. “We met a year ago, at that bar with the anchors and nets and shit hanging from the ceiling.”

“ _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_ slash garage sale?”

“That’s the place,” said Steve. “I think it’s closed now.”

“That’s possible,” said Bucky.

He had been getting increasingly bored with the bar scenes and more often than not stayed in to drink with Clint and Natasha. In a neat trick, Natasha had moved into Clint’s room with him, Bucky had moved into Natasha’s old room (read: closet), and all three of them paid slightly-less-than-exorbitant rent.

Plus, their landlady gave them a spare key for roof access. She never said why, but Bucky had noticed the Purple Heart hanging in her window, and the pitying, maternal way her eyes lingered on his prosthetic.

“You, uh, go to school here?” Bucky asked.

Steve snorted. “Me? Nah. I graduated six years ago. But I’m only working part-time right now and twenty bucks goes a long way. You know how it is.”

Bucky did, but he wasn’t nearly as good at expressing it with the right amount of self-deprecation and humor as Steve. Mostly Bucky just felt a creeping sense of shame that tinted every sentence out of his mouth.

“How is—how are you?”

Steve’s brow furrowed. “In general?”

“Well, yeah. But also the last time we talked, you’d just lost your mom.”

“Been okay,” said Steve. “Disappeared off the social grid for a while.”

“Understandable.”

“Yeah.” Steve ran a hand through his hair, pushing his bangs back. “It’s—”

The classroom door opened and a youngish guy with a scruffy beard and equally scruffy clothes stepped into the hallway. He explained that they would come into the classroom one at a time and sit at a covered booth and answer questions about a series of pictures.

It would be straightforward, painless, over in four minutes, the guy added, and was in aid of his doctoral dissertation. This last bit was said with quiet desperation and an undertone of a caffeine crash.

Bucky carefully skirted past the PhD student when it was his turn to be ushered into the classroom. The guy was pale in a way that suggested he sat in a dark library all day and barely moved. Bucky could incapacitate him in less than five seconds.

 

Steve was leaning against the wall outside the classroom when Bucky finished, twenty dollars in hand. Bucky didn’t want to think _waiting for him_ , so he nodded to Steve as he walked by.

“Hey,” Steve greeted him. He put his phone back into his pocket, pushed off the wall, fell into step with Bucky. “Let’s get coffee. There’s a cheap place around the corner. I mean like a dollar a cup.”

“We just got a twenty.”

“And I just got a commission while I was waiting for you. C’mon, my treat.”

“Commission for what?” Bucky asked as they walked out of the building and onto the street.

“An engagement portrait. _Game of Thrones_ style. All that fur is going to take forever, but it’s more interesting than the interior of the _Enterprise_.”

“ _Game of Thrones_ seems kinda a bad omen for the start of a marriage.”

“You’re telling me, but no accounting for taste. Though they want the dude sitting on the iron throne with the fiancée in his lap, so maybe there’s hope for them yet.”

“You can’t _share_ the iron throne,” said Bucky.

Steve snorted. “Maybe because no one’s tried yet—”

Their TV conservation lasted through ordering at the coffee counter and finding a tiny table in an even tinier sidewalk seating area, wedged in between trash cans and two other people furiously taking advantage of the wifi.

This was always the part of conversations where Bucky got stuck. It was fine talking to Clint or Natasha, who he’d known since infancy and high school, respectively, because they already knew each other’s _stuff_. Comfortable silences had long been a part of their routine, and talking about everything-and-nothing wasn’t an issue.

But what in his life would possibly be interesting to Steve? Bucky went to work, came home, hung out with his roommates, had Shabbat with his sister, visited his parents on Sunday, and maybe watched some TV in between.

“I used to be better at this,” said Bucky.

Steve was blowing at his coffee. He rolled up his flannel sleeves so they wouldn’t fall over his hands and into the liquid. “At what?”

“Talking. Conversation. I think I’m—” _boring now_.

Steve tilted his head. “Quiet people aren’t dull. Just means you choose what you _do_ say with care. Better than people who can’t stop running their mouths.”

“Like you?” said Bucky without thinking, but Steve grinned.

“Like me,” he agreed. “My friend Sam says—”

“You know Sam?” Bucky exclaimed, before realizing that there were, in fact, probably thousands of Sams living in Brooklyn. “Sam Wilson, I mean.”

“Yeah. Works at the VA.” At Bucky’s look of surprise, Steve explained, “Clint goes to his group sessions. They both talk about you a lot. Actually.” Steve pushed his hair out of his eyes. “I’ve been hearing about you for years. I just didn’t know it was _you_.”

This was a very weird realization—one that should have made Bucky feel stranger than he did. He instead smiled and relaxed as Steve told him about his part-time job doing lighting at an independent theater, his part-time job doing fundraising for the Special Olympics, his part-time job working front desk at the animal shelter, and his art that all of the part-times were funding.

“The term ‘part-time’ has become an active part of my vocabulary,” Steve said ruefully, and Bucky felt comfortable enough to catch Steve up on this week’s Barnes Family Drama. Steve had a deep voice and an even deeper laugh that didn’t match the size of his body; Bucky wanted to hear more of it.

When their coffee was gone and the sun had shifted, Bucky made to stand up. “Well,” he said, sliding into his standard excuse, “I have to get to work. I—”

And then he realized he didn’t want to leave. He was so used to being miserable-anxious and desperate to get away from company that he slid into his exit line automatically.

But he didn’t want to leave.

Steve, however, could read social cues and was already standing.

“Yeah, me too,” he said. “I’m already late. See you later, okay?” and he walked off, throwing a grin over his shoulder.

Bucky stood there, palm open and outstretched, until a passing siren jolted him back into reality.

 

.

Bucky spent the better part of two weeks moping before he realized Steve meant it when he said _see you later_. He strolled into the coffee shop where Bucky worked and plonked right down on a barstool and began to talk like they’d just seen each other the day before. Bucky didn’t get a word in edgewise until Steve paused to breathe.

“It’s next week, actually,” said Bucky.

“What? No. Can’t be. It’s still September.”

“Today is October the twenty-third, pal,” Bucky said, sliding a cappuccino across the counter to a bone-thin girl.

“Oh,” said Steve, dumbfounded.

Bucky looked down at Steve’s hands. They were clean, but faded paint flecks were still visible across his skin.

“This may be the first time in three days that I’ve left my apartment,” Steve said sheepishly. “And I might have worked ten days straight before that.” He ran a hand through his hair or adjusted his glasses when he was nervous or embarrassed. This struck Bucky as extremely promising.

“So is Halloween being next week a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Both,” said Steve. “I don’t like it. Too many people—and too noisy—” he tapped his right ear; Bucky didn’t know what that was about—“so I usually hole up with zombie movie marathons.”

“I binge _The Twilight Zone_ ,” Bucky admitted.

“What a science nerd you are,” said Steve. He reached around the counter and took Bucky’s hand. Bucky’s pulse skyrocketed, but Steve was turning it over.

“Huh,” Steve said. He traced the lines of Bucky’s palm. Bucky might currently be on fire. “Do you believe in palmistry?”

“Not a chance.”

Surely Bucky’s voice didn’t sound that hoarse to everyone else.

“Shame,” Steve said with a shit-eating grin. “I was going to lay a truly awful line on you—”

“Oh, please do. I beg of you.”

“Nah, the moment’s passed now. But you’re coming over to my place for Halloween—don’t argue, it’s in the cards—” tapping Bucky’s palm—“and we can even watch _The Twilight Zone_ for twenty percent of the night.”

“Forty percent.”

“Thirty-five and not a minute more.”

“What if I distract you for the whole of your sixty-five percent?”

“Then we’re both winners.”

Steve’s grin was so bright that Bucky had to look away. He took a few more orders to calm himself (quite a line had piled up while he had been staring at Steve) and then turned his attention back to Steve.

Steve was uncharacteristically serious. “Hey. This is only if you want to, you know.”

Bucky raised an eyebrow.

“I mean.” Steve adjusted his glasses. “Clearly I’m interested in you. And I’m pretty sure you like me. But. My roommate is a vet too, and I know how it was for him for a while and—I don’t want to push. I’m pushy, I know.”

“Yeah, you are,” Bucky said. “Punk.” He snagged a piece of paper off the pad sitting by the phone and wrote his phone number in careful strokes. He was wary of most things lately, even this small loudmouth, but—

Bucky slid the paper over to Steve. Steve took it, rolling his eyes, and pulled out his phone. “You couldn’t’ve just put it in my phone like a normal person?” Steve complained.

“I’m not pushy like that.”

“What a jerk,” Steve mumbled, smiling as he hit _save_. A minute later Bucky’s phone buzzed with a calendar entry: _Movie night_ , the title said, followed by a string of emojis: _television, ghost, pumpkin, knife, blood, heart, popcorn, moon, sparkles_.

“Don’t think I didn’t notice that heart stuck in the middle,” said Bucky.

“It’s green like your jealous face,” Steve said innocently. “Peggy told me all about it.”

 

**Author's Note:**

>  tumblr 


End file.
